PointyNeedle
Find your needle in your haystack
The problem PointyNeedle solves
Tracking today is locked behind expensive, proprietary ecosystems that limit accessibility and customisation.
PointyNeedle democratises tracking by letting anyone build low-cost ESP32 tags that leverage the global Find My network and long-range LoRa on ESP32-S3. It delivers reliable, flexible tracking for personal items, equipment, and real-world assets without vendor lock-in.
Challenges we ran into
Oh boy where do we start...
Initially, our entire project was meant to be something else which was to be deployed on a raspberry pi. But our raspberry pi died the moment we connected it here :(
We used a backup ESP32 to run the same idea but didn't work so we pivoted to this idea right here.
On this idea, we were stuck with no response from the servers from a while. It was due to the keygen of the ESP not functioning as intended. We updated the code and it worked well :D
Last moments are the worst as always. We were not getting newer data from the servers and the last response we received was 12:07 AM for 4 hours straight. The issue was with the cache of the ESP blocking packets so we flashed the entire thing again and it was all good.
Tracks Applied (1)
Grand Prize
Technologies used